Adobe® After Effects® Creative Cloud® Starter Kit

Interpolation, Motion Blur, & Nesting Compositions

Adobe® After Effects® Creative Cloud® Starter Kit

Lesson 6 of 14

Interpolation, Motion Blur, & Nesting Compositions

Lesson Info

Interpolation, Motion Blur, & Nesting Compositions

His head's going to come down here a little bit will rotate it down a little like oh I just threw my shovel away and may not be perfect but it's it's close and then he's moving and then he realizes it and let's change the position of his head hey, so this is the surprise part and go up and over and then back down so you links um thanks so there's a few different motions I want to make here so I just want to ram preview at sea if my times right yanks ok so it's a little slow want to speed it up a little so I can grab grab all three of these and just whips option drag so they speeded up all three of them like point ok if it comes out it's an involuntary response to the ad that sounds guys, I'm sorry it's just you're going to have to listen to those today you can add your own at home if you want. Um you guys can chime in if there's a great sound you want to make for one of these animations please d'oh please do. Okay, so he's whoa, what the heck we'll another thing I'm going to do here is...

this is where I go back and forth between rotate and position I can key frame over here to the next key frame on goto are and this is where I want his head tio whoa back and then go back to position some lining everything up go to the neck ski frame good are for rotation and then I'm just going to copy and paste and now his head flips back when he well so it's over exaggeration and okay, so what's his body going to do while he's doing that wow um we're going to have his torso is already flipping back his arms need to fly a little bit I think so let's get his left arm in motion here let's go ahead and copy where that isthe right harm I'm not copy I'm sorry let's just let's set a key frame for both of those just so they stay right where they are we don't want anything to happen there and right about there and then we go to the next key from using the key frames from the head as our guide going there for the arms uh this arm I'm going to move up this arm I'm going to looks wrong one torso um my left arm labels labels like labels and then here we go and hiss right? Odysseus forearm here let's move the forum out too that um so it's like whoa ok, so now I can come back here used that take this key frame copy and paste and then this one belongs to the right arm copy and paste all right, see what that looks like well, with a little fast but it's a surprise so um let's see if this will let me do this with more than one yeah stretch it out just a little bit make this one match stretch it out they're slow down just a little bit whoa ok, so one thing have to do is fix this because this is rotation on ly position needs to match so I'm going to go to that point in time grab these key frames option or ault stretch out those key frames so that the position and the rotation match on his head it's smoother animation well ok all right so we've got this down to a point where he throws a shovel away digs in the dirt whoa ok there we go. So to smooth this out a little bit we could go in there and hand manipulate some of these key frames. We could also change some of our key frame interpellation in here a bit let's see what this is is set set on right now I think by default we still have linear key frame interpellation I right click on the key frame and I goto key frame interpellation and we'll see that this gets a little more advanced in terminology but primarily you want your things there emotion too just move from point a to point b to point c and to do that you want to keep it linear you don't want to have a lot of curves and a lot of crazy going on we did do a busy a curve on the motion of the shovel so that's going to show us that it isn't linear at this point so if I but if I was to click that my choices are busy a continuous busy a audio auto busy or hold I just wanted it to hold in a point and not move at all until it got to the next key frame that's one way to do that but linear is where we want to keep things sometimes when you're moving things in a path um it will tend to uh tend to go to a auto busy day or busy eh and you wonder why between point a and point see why is it that when it gets to point b then it overshoots it and goes somewhere else before it comes back to a point point c so if you want something that just you know starts here then it goes to the next um you know point on then you wanted to go just boing boing boing then it's important to make sure that you you have your your settings are linear let's look down here at the shovel and see what our key freeman tribulation is so here it's got special is just current setting so typically I would either set that too busy either one of those but with this one since ive on ly moving two points I'm not going to a third point it's not going to create an extra extra warp for me there, so I'm going to leave all of that well enough alone well, you do cover that more in some of the advanced training that we've already got here on creative life I don't want to muddy the waters too much, but I do know one of our in studio guests here today had asked during a break and I just did did at least want to cover where you find that information and how some of that isn't is affected. So one more thing that might make this animation look a little more smooth is to add a little motion blur to it and this is one of the really powerful cool things about animating in after effects versus just trying to do stuff in flash or whatever is this motion blur option and that's this little icon here motion blur and should show up a pop up enables motion blur for all layers with its elected so I've selected that guy and this will this will slow down your render times if you have a lot of this going on so right now I only want to motion blur the shovel so I'm going to under this uh row here under this icon I'm going to select that box and that's going to motion blur the shovels and now when it's moving notice that it creates motion blur so when we animated it smooths it out it looks like you know it's really flying off the sign now so if I wanted to motion blur everything um do this and we'll do aerial closes up now we can see the whole line and all motion blur everything that moves and only the faster movements will get some kind of motion blur like his hand on the left when he loses the shovel you see that happen his head a little bit when it bounces up arms when they flail so it really smoothes out the look a lot doesn't necessarily smooth out the motion that each element is doing but it does smooth out the appearance that it shows on screen and that makes it it gets a little more of a film look to it too great so did g seven design says is there a way to lock or parent the position key frames with the layers when I move a selection of layers on the canvas the position points remain in the original spot which is usually not what I need to d'oh well it's just a different set of key frames if I'm understanding maybe they're moving the wrong key frames or they're moving something I'm not quite sure I'm not quite sure I understand the question you know cool so I'm not going to try to answer if I don't really understand and maybe we'll get more information yeah maybe they'll give us a little more what they're really looking for great okay so at this point I may pull out the other animation that I've pleated on this so that we can move along on this because this is a very lengthy process obviously to try to get through this so let me close this project and no hanky I why not no no let's let's just close it um I've been I've been working all this time without saving it which is a bozo no no you don't do that um I hope that's not a copyright infringement using that word okay um don't say so ok hi he's not on the air anymore out who owns the license ok so let's ah let's close up photo shop actually let's just hide it and let me go to here okay this is the one that you'll see if you get the download this will be the project that you see that kind of has the different things that we've worked on this morning showing just the illustrator file in here another comp with all of the layers ready to animate and then one where I've animated already some of the animation so that's where we're going to be at this point um and then we're going to move from there on to what do we do to complete this and make it look like a real thing? So you can see here that I've done a few things so let's just bring it to the point where we left off, which is right about here and you'll see I've got some other layers going on in here doing other things let me bring this up where we can see what we're doing so let me render this so some of my actions were a little more subtle somewhere a little little crazier the shovel takes off a little faster but you get you get the gist of it so I moved his legs a little bit when he kind of got shocked it's like whoa, ok, so that's a ce faras we've gotten so far so now that he's been shocked, what I did is he will see no why do you have these things split up there? Well, I showed you how I split a layer before with the shift command d and that's what I did with his head here because what I have is I've got him standing there in shock, looking both ways ok, is anybody looking all right? Anybody looking, anybody looking and then I go on and I proceed to have him walk off so that's that's a fairly long process of going through here trying to make this walk work with something that wasn't really drawn to walk it was drawn to stand there and be a symbol so you know, weii it's connected we've somehow he's turned around he's facing the other way you know, there's a lot of that stuff that's just taken with a grain of salt because quite frankly I should have turned his hips around at some point when he was like right about there should have flipped him around so that he actually has a butt is he's moving away and not just, you know, yeah, whatever. So uh anyway there's a lot of things like that that you know, if you really take your time and get those subtleties worked out, you definitely definitely can so what I've done here let's take a look at our where things are is another thing I do to his visual references all color my layers to help me with my references. Andi I do that in every project just kind of like I do on the desktop color folders and files different colors because that helps me visually identify with what what's going on so you can see you can see out here even in my project panel, I've got things they're all colored because they're doing different things um but in here there's one that's red and that's because that's the that's the main one that's the main thing that everything gets parented too and that helps me with the upper body is torso on up that's above the hip line everything else is below the hip line so it helps me visually identify ok, where am I at a glance without having to look at all of the all of the names I can also see in this one teo I left my head down close to the torso and I left my heart in san francisco I'm sorry I just came out so you can see it's organized a little different than I had in my other one there just from that point alone but let's look at the things that move the most here and we'll see let's take all of these here and let's look at our key frames here for rotation and we see it okay? The legs don't start moving at all till right about here his surprise? No. And then we see all of these different key frames out here where they're moving along as he's walking off it's kind of carefully tiptoeing off against a very subjective emotion. I don't have him just briskly walking off I have him uh just kind of like sneaking off like a hope nobody's looking I'm just going to sneak out of here so I've got him paste fairly slow through all of that he kind of walks off camera there so let's render the whole thing out here quick quick ram preview really fast on here ok there goes shock looking around anybody looking ok I'm going to sneak off see if anybody knows okay so and some of that was there's a little hesitation in here right about in here is like is reaching a little bit I think that's right about the point where I took um a loop because a sequence like that you can actually loop some parts and what I mean by loop is taking a ah start frame in an end frame copying all the key frames in between those and then just being able to paste them right over here because that way that cycle is the same for a walk cycle as a lot of times where you'll do that we just have a walk cycle or emotion cycle of something and then you bring it in to another cop as an animation then that cycles already and you just repeated a bunch of times where that's where you can help with this lane he's already done one whole cycle of arms and legs all moving then I don't need to go in and re hand animate those all over again I just find which one goes where so let's look at just one leg here and see ok let's look at his left thigh which is his it's actually his right that are left and see this is about the beginning of a walk cycle for him because he's standing and then he's walking so I would look at this key frame and then see where I would need to bring it again say all the way through here to right about here so what I could do then is grab those key frames and copy them and then bring them out here course I'm already off screen here at this point but I would actually bring them right about here and then just paced because everything from that point is just a repeat of what he already did he's going to move that leg exactly the same way again that's just a cycle so I do that for each of the elements that move along that period of time so that's just a repeat of all of that so now what I want to do is actually put this into another composite I'm going to do what they call nesting I'm going to nest this comp inside another comp and this addresses on an issue that was brought up earlier why do you work in high resolution? Well, I can address that here let's see what's our composition settings here um yeah yes ones even bigger five thousand by three thousand I've expanded the size it has got more room to walk off um so I've got all this resolution but I want to put this into a working, you know, video resolution calm so I can come up here and go to composition there's two ways to make a new composition I can come up here to new composition, composition, new composition, aiken do command and for new or it can come down here to this little icon we showed earlier where I made a cop from the er from the single single single files, whether is the illustrator file or photo shop and instead of drag clicking over it to create a competent, just create a new one there too. So it's going to bring up this dialog box? And if you want to use a preset there's, a whole bunch of them in here already, a lot of times, I just I just go in there and type in what I'm looking for. I want ten adp video that's what I want, I wanted seven twenty I'll do that, so depends on what you're what you're building, we're getting into the dark science of video, and I know larry jordan kind of went into that with the white board and all of that the other day, giving major kudos for for taking that on that was a huge thing I'm not going to get into the dark sciences at this point. I just want tio create a basic animation that I can play out on the internet so at this point I wanted to be fairly high risk so good hd video quality is nineteen twenty by seven twenty it's just one of these if you grab any of these that are a ten, eighty, twenty nine like that it's a good place to start or the hd tv ten eighty and this twenty nine point nine seven without getting too technical that just means that that that's pretty close to thirty friends for second that's broadcast quality thirty frames per se you really want to get thirty you can click here and say I want it to be thirty so you could make it thirty and then you can go from there the best thing to do however we cancel this look at what your animations already set to what did you start your animation and and then match that if you're going to make this an animation so you look in my composition settings and that is twenty nine nine seven that keeps my frame rate the same and that's an important thing to kind of know going into it something I kind of skimmed over because we were just moving stuff we're just animating we're just moving, moving key frames and moving pixels and if you're wanting to do something that's going to be for a very specific purpose this is what I've said from day one twenty five years ago working in digital print what is the what's the highest common denominator of the final potential output going to be and that's what you want to start if I was doing an illustration auras, airbrushing and retouching I'm really shown major now as retouching photos and negatives before computers and we'd have to know okay this is going to be a billboard or this is going to be a movie poster or whatever you knew that you had to work at a certain size then then the digital era came in you were dealing with pixels per inch and dots per inch for print in the same kind of thing works here too if you know that you're going to have this go out to the internet youtube or video or whatever and you want it to have hd quality there you're going to want to work in a space that's going to accommodate that and that goes with frame rate as well um either twenty four or thirty or twenty three nine six or twenty nine nine seven those are industry standards with the video that's coming in and if you're going to mix your animation with video you have to match your animation do the video that you're going to put it in that goes for motion graphics that goes for animated lower thirds that goes for animation like this so if I was to put this over a video say, itcause doing this for a car commercial, then I would have to make sure that I knew what that was going to be done in and nowadays they're dealing talking about two k for k five k, whatever, and it gets really crazy out there, so you have to know, what does the client expect is a delivery what's the medium coming in? How doe I match that? And working that? Typically, if somebody says the client on lee wants this to be a ten adp it's a broadcast quality piece, but they're giving you four k footage. I'm gonna work in four k because a year from now they're going to want to bring that up and everybody's all four k with their tvs and everything. And you did this animation low res, they're going to want a president, you're you're stuck so it's just it's not that easy, then to just scale something. So again, another reason why I work big shrink down to make it fit because I can always come back and re scale it if I need to. So getting beyond that speech, uh, I'm going to make a new comp, we'll get back to making a new calm, okay, here we go. Ten eighteen, nineteen, twenty I'm gonna call this new calm just so I don't get it mixed up with anything else new cop there it is all right? And I'm just using the scroll wheel here to zoom in and out on my screen here you're wondering if I wanted to get rid of these rulers up here? It's the same thing isn't photoshopped just to command our we're control are but the nice thing no, those are that you get guy it's just like in photo shop I can bring out guides I can move stuff around again line things up and that's how I was working in here if you notice I have a guide in here, I forgot to mention that earlier already put that guide in there, so I kind of kept me with him at least stains somewhat on I'm a walking line of some sort, so that one isn't exactly lining up to the bottom of his feet, but it least gave me some kind of a reference to work from so really important to be able to use guides in these things as well, case right now this is just a blank cop there's nothing in here uh, I am going to take my working men signs layers three that comp I'm going to put it inside here, so I'm going out here to my working men signs layer three eyes click and drag him down in here it's an element ok looks really big because he really is so I just go to scale scaling down there he is so now when he walks off we'll just walk off that way okay, so I want to put a background in there so what have I got to work with here? I've got this one here of the piece of stock photo imagery it could be a video it could be anything it's really huge too so let's scale it down okay? So it's looking more like it's an actual road sign and he's out there he's moving off it well, a couple things I want to do to make this a little more believable fly off, right? Yeah. Okay um because I have to do some colorizing in some some things on this particular layer. So I'm going to come over here to my effects and presets window panel and if you don't have that open, you can come up here to window and down to effects and presets that allow you to turn that one on and off or bring it to the front if you can't find it it's right there and I can go in here and since I'm really old school I mean really old school his I use plug ins and stuff a lot I shouldn't say a lot I don't use a lot of plug ins, but I'll use a few plug ins a lot in premiere in after effects that I'll use over and over again because I'm comfortable working in that and some of them are some of the red giant plug ins calorie sta used that a lot because it gives me a really nice color color chooser color corrector inside of premier on and also a real smart motion blur um are smb you khun google that it's ari vision effects are e colon vision effects all spelled out real smart motion blur I think it's like one ninety nine or something like that sounds expensive for a plug in but what it does it will blow you away if you go and look at their demo videos, I use that because if I rendered out this animation and then brought it back in, I would have no more control over my motion blur anymore until I put that plug in in and then it looks at the pixels in it says, oh pixels or moving, I'm going to blur them so that they look like they make sense in the motion it's an amazing thing again that goes a little more advanced I don't want to get too far off the tracks here with it, so um I I do want to bring that up but old schools, faras color correction and doing things sometimes I just go to levels and human saturation just like I do in photo shop, so I'll just type in level here and color correction levels there we go right there and lips I attached it to the wrong layer here we go make sure I've got country road yes that's one just click and drag or I think I can just double click it and applies it to whatever a layer I've got selected here so you can eat a click and drag or doubleclick as long as you're layer selected. So here is a familiar hissed a gram that everybody understands already, so we'll stay in that space I can brighten it up either with my contrast um I can just brighten it up globally here and I can work in any of the channels and I can kind of make it a little more fall like here and I can't get my blue is a little bit and pull yellow into it give it a nice fall like look to it without totally destroying it. Well, hard to see on this monitor this area here anyway that gives me a little bit of ah jump on her and there's two ways that could turn that on and off I can do it right here in the effects panel just where it says fx right up here you can turn that on and off so I can see my before and after and I can always go back and adjust it because it is a plug in. Another thing is if I have several effects in here I can turn them all on and off down here in the timeline uh by just clicking this effects on and off okay? Because I'm going to add another effect to this I'm going to add a blur and this one I wanted to be ah, just typing blur and see what our options are here. Um I want the camera lens blur I'm gonna double click that and add it to this because I want to push that background away quite a bit. So you know, like thirty let's try maybe forty I think that's what I ended up doing forty not like camera lens blur because it does give you it spreads those pixels out a bit it spread them out so that it looks like you get if you could get any highlights or speculators in there it actually see little hex on a girl hexagonal how's that whatever work little hexagons um in those speculate highlights anyway it pushes that back quite a bit, so that helps so anyway, let's take a look at what this looks like rendered here I got them all in there and then he's slowly going off we're just rendering here bram preview can now it's going to play in real time there's that yeah thanks do any sneaks off the screen ok and that was cool but it was starting to bug me so I could go in there and, uh go back to this point here say you know what? I want him to start sneaking off and then run off I don't want himto I don't want him tio you know, keep sneaking off because it gets a little boring there so I started to go in and compress all of these key frames like I showed you earlier grab some then option or ault drag him in and try to line them all up and that is going down there's going oh, well, you know, I kept screen up my animation it's like, you know I could do that and spend all day doing that but ham right here juan oh, I do this other little trick which is right about here I want him to start taking off. Ok? So I'm going to split my layer right there because it's a sub comp sub khamis is a comp inside a comp it's nested inside so now I've got that treated just like a piece of footage so like video so now we can right click on this come down to time and time stretch now this is a really cool feature because you can apply this to anything and after fix if you're used to using premiere and you've got time altering uh, controls and there you can do the same thing here but you can do it with an animation uh, clip so if it's a nested comp if it's a rendered animation or a video you can apply this to this so if I go in and I say fifty percent noticed my time just changed my duration just changed so if you go back up two hundred we'll see it's four oh a that means it's four seconds and eight frames by go to fifty it's going to go to two seconds and four frames so if I click on okay, we'll see that it just got shorter the bar just got shorter in here means I just shortened my whole animation up to so you have to be careful doing this but let's look at the under assault do little render here and then he runs off a little faster okay? So I will probably tweak this just a little bit me undo that part because I'm going to start it just a little earlier so he takes one two steps and get started right about in here because the effect is more dramatic there going to go to my time right click but a time time stretch fifty okay another way to get to that same menu if I don't want to right click I just come up here to my layer and come up here to a layer in time in time stretch another way to get there another thing I want to do is make sure my motion blur is on this layer to so going to turn that on turn that on those layers so when he's running off we see a little more motion blur hopefully and squeeze us up band hit a ramp review they slows down a little bit there because he's got to think a lot more where he does that the computer does ok there's a guy sneak and ok, I'm going to get out of there quicker so I could ramp that up even more uh with my time I could do time remapping and do some really crazy stuff which I've covered in some of the other movies that you'll see here in the library but let me just ramp it up a little faster I want him to really boogie out of there okay shovel, surprise sneak and get out there so there's our animated guy and we still didn't come up with a name with for him other than craig, right? I feel like that all right for maybe one one question before we were about you so I just I just wanted to make sure that we uh, reiterate this this comment because I know there was a lot of beginners out there because this particular image feels like a vector graphic. Phx mike would like to know if this is all vector graphics. Why is it difficult to scale up? Okay, they're only vectors until we leave illustrator at this point. Um, the way again we're working with I'm gonna get into some of that in the afternoon right after lunch, which is probably good segway bringing vectors in teo into after effects and converting them to shape players will allow us to do a lot of different things to him, especially we get into three d space because with aftereffect cc, you're able to do some really nice with with shapes and with text you can get some nice like in boston looks and some a three dimensional volumetric looks with some of those vector graphics. We're going to do that with this sign and then some text and some other stuff showing you some of the really cool stuff in three d but that's, when you really want those those vectors in there because you can convert him to shapes and deal with him at that point um, and with this with this method, this gets it all into the pixel world earlier on and allows you to to have just unlimited amount of control here

Class Description

Adobe® After Effects® is not only the broadcast industry’s motion graphics and animation standard, but it’s now more accessible than ever as part of your Creative Cloud® membership. In this intensive 6-hour course, renowned author, video producer, and Adobe Community Professional Jeff Foster will show you how to use the many functions of Adobe® After Effects® to enhance your projects with animated titling and 3D motion graphics.